A few weeks ago I did some work for a client that is about to re-platform a public facing website written in Forte 4GL to Java. Forte itself is not the problem, as far as I can tell the technology is sound. Forte is a legacy platform that is no longer supported by Sun. The client is finding it impossible to hire people that have the required skills and want to work on Forte applications. The business wants to make some significant upgrades to the application. Sensibly, the client does not want to invest any more money into a legacy platform so they have kicked off the effort to re-platform it to Java at a considerable cost.
So far, this is an all too common story. There are legacy platforms and applications everywhere. What really surprised me is that the current application is only 4-5 years old, which tells me that Forte went from mainstream to legacy in an amazingly short time.
All this is interesting background in the context of what’s happening with Ruby at the moment. The popularity of Ruby is increasing all the time and we’re finding that corporate clients are starting to choose Ruby over Java more and more. Is this a gamble? Does anyone know where Ruby will be in 5 years time? 10 years? Will the current mob of smart people gathered around Ruby have moved on to the Next Great New Language? I can understand why CIOs are cautious of Ruby, I would be too.
One important consideration is the part played by the open source and Ruby communities. Vendor support is something that corporates traditionally appreciate, it gives them a warm fuzzy reassuring feeling. But in this case Sun bought out Forte and essentially killed it to neutralise a rival to J2EE. Thanks vendor! Ruby is not owned by anyone so the risk of it being exterminated is minimised. If Ruby dies it will be due to natural causes.
Java is an interesting case study because it managed to strike a nice balance between vendor support and a strong community. In the initial stages Sun invested a lot of effort developing, promoting and selling Java despite it’s well documented shortcomings. Sometime in the late 90’s the community around Java really took over and was responsible for making Java mainstream. Java is now owned by the community, just like Ruby.
The case for Ruby in the enterprise could certainly benefit from some vendor support. Efforts to deploy Ruby applications on accepted enterprise platforms will also be key (e.g. JRuby, IronRuby).
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